1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to messaging. More specifically, the present invention relates to techniques for providing quality of service (QoS) for the transmission of messages over networks which potentially span a wide geographic area.
2. Description of Background
Quality of Service (QoS) is a requirement, or a set of requirements, imposed on the transfer of data over a computer network. A network which provides quality of service is configured to cause data transfers to be performed according to the requirement or set of requirements. The network may provide an assurance that the quality of service requirements will be enforced. The quality of services (QoS) of the messaging substrate plays a critical role in the overall system performance as perceived by the end users.
Publish/Subscribe messaging is a fundamental mechanism for interconnecting different services and systems in the modern service oriented computing architecture. In the publish/subscribe paradigm, publishers transmit messages to subscribers. Each message may be associated with a specific topic. A subscriber may subscribe to a topic in order to receive messages transmitted by publishers on that topic. An arbitrary number of subscribers may subscribe to the same topic. It is noted that publish/subscribe is commonly abbreviated as “pub/sub”.